So the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.

I’m highly skeptical of the claim that streaming services would have intentionally dropped their bitrates at the expense of perceived quality. There’s definitely research going on to deliver the same amount of perceived quality at lower average bitrates through variable bitrate encodings and so on, but this is sophisticated research where perceived quality is carefully controlled for.

It probably saves them a ton of money, and 90% of their customers won’t notice because they’re on their phone while watching in the background.

So this is fundamentally not how video streaming works, and I think this is important for the average person to learn - if you stream a video in the background or with your screen turned off, video data will stop loading. There’s literally no point in continuing to fetch the video track if it’s not being rendered. It would be like downloading the audio track for French when the user is watching with the English track turned on, i.e. nonsensical.

This subsequently removes this as a possible reason for any video streamer intentionally reducing their bitrate, as the savings would not be materialized for background playback.

To make it weirder, I’m confident they boost the bitrates on their new releases to get the approval of the enthusiastic viewers, then drop it after the reviews are in.

Depending on the usage patterns for the platform in question, this probably doesn’t make sense either.

Is this a vibes-based position, or did you actually check the bitrate of the segments?

30m walking is like a sub-10 minute bike ride. No biggie!

It’s going to be significantly more than the year 33000 before we run out of 64-bit epoch timestamps.

The max value for signed 64-but epoch values is more than 292 billion years away, or 20 times the age of the universe itself.

So yeah, we’re basically solid forever with 64-bit

Might want to give notebooks like Jupyter a try - they make for a pretty good time when it comes to working with data.

Honestly spreadsheets are kind of great for some things. I’m sure most of their bad rep comes from being applied to the wrong problems - see businesses using it for basically everything.

For tech, check out Hard Fork.

Vibes-based QA only

Dude had his claim to keep on living denied

40 minutes is clearly in the range of doable walks, although if it were a commute I’d do it by bike every time which would shorten it down to 10 minutes, probably.

Is this an American problem that I’m too European to comprehend? If I forget to buy something at the store I literally just walk 4 minutes to the nearest store and buy whatever I forgot. Maybe I’ll even pick it up on the back home on my bike for even less of a time penalty.

The Twilight Zone - Nightmare at 20,000 feet, I believe

Gotta make use of that Force Majeure-clause

Some forward thinking - which we all know is most definitely not a thing when it comes to suburban development patterns - would see these installed from the beginning to ultimately save money long term on maintenance and upgrades.

Since the suburbs are an unsustainable Ponzi scheme designed to cram as much money out as possible though, they will go for the cheapest up-front option, total lifetime cost be damned.

The municipality I lived in previously had a really interesting project where they were trying to improve the lifecycle of underground infrastructure.

Instead of digging up the ground, putting in/repairing something/whatever, and then covering it up, they were going to install a permanent ‘infrastructure tunnel’ which could have installations and repairs be done without digging up and covering.

If successful, this kind of seems like what the shipping container did to the shipping industry, an incredible efficiency play.

I don’t think you necessarily need to have studied a lot of math to be successful in programming, but you will need it if you want to get a CS degree, which in turn can be a good lever to a fruitful programming career.

My advice when it comes to math - math skills build upon the concepts you’re expected to have learned before, meaning that if you didn’t fully get everything in the past, then your foundation is not in great shape and you will struggle at higher levels. Going back and repeating the fundamentals just so that you fully understand everything is very helpful in my experience.

I also think that understanding math is rewarding in itself, for what it’s worth!

On account of the election, you can basically be sure that passenger rail will not happen to any extent any time soon. Expect bigger cars and more highways instead, as this is what is outlined in Project 2025.

Incredibly bleak.

I don’t doubt him being a Nazi.

I think his Nazism is basically orthogonal to this - everyone and their grandmother who relies on the American empire for anything is kissing the ring at the moment, Nazi or not.

Are we supposed to be surprised that someone in Ukraine - a country at war, highly dependent on support from the U.S to continue to stand up to its invader - now appeals to the new hand that can either feed them or cut them off?

Square-Cube Law strikes again